Hearthpwn

Patch 2.4 Roundup
Greymane Out & Hero Spotlight, What Hero Comes Next?
Legion Alpha Design Notes, Tank and Healer Tuning, Logging Feature, New Alpha Content

Old Mechanic Revealed - Burn

Ben Brode teaches us of Burn, a mechanic which never made it to beta or release.

Quote from Ben Brode

This is cool. Can you mention any of the keywords you guys threw out back in alpha/beta? That part of the article is interesting to me.
Burn was a pretty bad one. If you dealt damage and you had "Burn", the defender would start "Burning", which meant they would take 1 damage at the start of your turns from then on. Really only good if you burned the enemy hero once - mostly it was irrelevant. There were a lot of others, but some might come back some day!

Ben Brode Talks to the Community

Yesterday, a new episode of Designer Insights was uploaded to the Hearthstone YouTube channel which not only got some negative feedback but also spurred some responses from Ben Brode. We've recapped all of that fun below in both bullet points and wall of text. Take your pick!

• Trying to get better at communicating with the community. 
• Not afraid of using smaller feature sets on mobile if they can't make something work.
• Announcing nerfs before they happen can suck. "Imagine a month of knowing Warsong will be nerfed and still losing to it daily."
• Still listening to community feedback for game features. Small features can be iterated on quickly.
• Mistakes happen. Something like Lock and Load can be made better by adding in more cheap spells in future sets.
• Warsong was nerfed mainly for eSports.
• Ben is thinking of doing more "making of" styling videos.

Quote from Hearthstone Devs and Community Managers

It would be nice if they did a postmortem on that design process [deck slots] similar to the other one he mentioned for the collection manager.
I've been thinking about that - might be fun. Thanks for the recommendation. - Ben Brode (Source)

This is great. The only problem is there isn't enough of it.

Sometimes negative perceptions go unaddressed for so long that it can feel to players like Brode and the Hearthstone team are aloof, arrogant, all sorts of other negative adjectives.

Even when we disagree with a decision, it makes a world of difference if someone from the team drops by and can either explain the rationale behind it, or even simply offer an apology with a promise to try to improve in the future.

I understand that it might be hard to film a video so often, but even an increased engagement with the community in written form would make things feel much better.
We've been trying to be better at this. I think the Warsong video came out only a day after the community outcry about the nerf? That's the type of turnaround I'd love to be able to hit more consistently. - Ben Brode (Source)

I'd rather hear about things that are more behind the scenes (rather than just saying that there is stuff behind the scenes)
I've been thinking about doing more "making of" videos. Thanks for the feedback! - Ben Brode (Source)

... let's take the Patron nerf. Let's say 2 or 3 months before the Patron nerf happened, you guys knew you were going to nerf something. Based on your video about iterations on nerfing the deck, I feel like you did know far in advance that something had to be done. You weren't sure how you were going to do it, but you recognized that the deck was overpowered and something had to be done. Why couldn't you just express that? ...
One of the things I am worried about is announcing a nerf too far before the patch that contains it. I think it feels worse to lose to Warsong when we've announced "this is broken and we are going to nerf it", than when it's a still a point of discussion. Imagine a month of knowing Warsong will be nerfed and still losing to it daily. That's my fear, and why we don't announce nerfs until right before the patch drops. - Ben Brode (Source)

How do you plan to address this concern of minimalistic designing for the sake of the UI?
Usually isn't an issue, in practice. But we have very creative UI designers and we often find great ways to have our cake and eat it too. Sometimes we resort to a smaller feature set on mobile if we really can't figure it out. (i.e. no right-click on a card in decklist to go straight to it in the collection manager) - Ben Brode (Source)

If I understand this correctly, because the development time is so incredibly long to get it exactly as you want, it is virtually impossible to act on community requests?

We thought Tavern Brawl was a reaction to anything, but apparently it took 2 years. The deck slots probably really have been in development already for a while, but it's not up to your standards yet.

But the main point I take from this: Blizzard is too slow to really take the community request into account in the short and perhaps even medium term.

It depends - Spectator Mode was a feature we weren't originally planning on but it jumped to the top of our list due to community feedback. Ranked Rewards is another one.

Smaller features are easier to pivot on quickly, big features take a lot of iteration and polish. But we're certainly listening and acting on requests as fast as we can. - Ben Brode (Source)

bbrode, what about bad design decisions? It's ok to happen, every software project has problems. But how to address them?

You guys thought Lock and Load would be a blast... nobody uses it. You guys didn't think MC would be something, and it is a mess.

So, that's it? Deal with?

Mistakes happen and we constantly patch in updates. It depends on the scope of the problem, and the cost of the different fixes. For example, if Lock and Load isn't as used as we'd like, we can make more cheap, good Hunter spells in upcoming sets. We don't need to solve this problem today. Similar to how we "fixed" dragons by adding a couple pieces in TGT. We've also made major changes like redoing the ranked system and adding ranked rewards.

The truth is that perfection is not really possible, and we just keep iterating to make things better over time. It's not going to happen all at once, but we target are biggest areas for improvement one by one. - Ben Brode (Source)

[deleted comment]
Warsong was interesting. It wasn't being played very much on ladder (compared to things like Undertaker), and was averaging <50% win ratio even when it was. Sometimes perception and reality don't really line up. We have the luxury of statistics, which you guys don't have, so it's tough. Maybe we should share more of the stats, but they sometimes risk skewing formats even more. We ended up nerfing Warsong mostly for eSports, because the Championship was incoming and at the very highest levels, people were achieving much higher win rates than most people on the ladder. - Ben Brode (Source)

Daxxarri on Deck Slots

Hearthstone Community Manager Daxxarri had this to say when poked about deck slots being "just one value".

Quote from Daxxarri

Changing deck slots is one value. Just one. The scrolling is there, the interface is there and as has been discovered even the functionality is there. So there is no need to hold that back as no quality control is required - the client functions exactly the same as before and there are no new UI elements. So I will have to assume the reason this is being held back is because finance still tries to figure out if they can/should kick everybody in the teeth by making slight improvements to the client cost money, I see no other reason for the delay.
It's not a crazy difficult task, though not so simple as a one-value change as you’re suggesting. Regardless, I think you're underestimating the amount of discussion the team does over what the right approach is, and all of the other less-visible factors in play. I’ve seen some of the iteration on deck slots, and yeah, I think the final implementation is probably going to end up being surprisingly simple—but it took a lot of discussion to get there, and it’s not finished yet. The team works as a group, which means that there’s a ton of discussion about individual changes, and then a ton of iteration after a course of action is decided on. They don’t want to just find the fastest, simplest, or easiest way to implement something, but the best way to do it. Hopefully while accomplishing other goals at the same time, and keeping everything in a nice, elegant little bundle.

They want to try to make sure that each step they take is the right one. That means the team moves at a deliberate pace on nearly everything. They’re thinking in terms of months and years, not days and weeks. I don’t know if that’s the kind of fact that anyone is thrilled about, but it’s the truth.

If you're interested in what goes into our UI design, here's that video featuring Derek Sakamoto that Ben mentioned in his video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axkPXCNjOh8

Zeriyah on Communication

The important points to take from this are:

• The HS Community Team prefers to use social media to communicate immediately with players and with potentially larger amounts of them.
• They use the forums to read feedback, hold (longer) discussions, and share news.

Quote from Zeriyah

With the evolution of the massive social media ecosystem, we do have to prioritize how and when we are communicating. We use the forums to read feedback and hold discussions, chime in on threads and topics, and share news, but we also have to support our other official channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

In this day and age, social media is more of an agile way of immediately communicating with players, and offers opportunities to reach more people as well. Communication methods are something we look at and reassess often. We are always asking, "How can we get important news to the largest portion of our audience quickly? How can we get important news to people that may not be connected to our channels?"

We have to communicate where the people are, and in doing that we have to be dynamic and shift priorities around from time to time. We'll still be here though.

Excuses excuses. Its not hard for you guys to whip up a script that automatically copy/pastes everything you post on Twitter to these forums. You did it for WoW.
That's not really how that works, and not really the preferred way we'd like to speak with our forum audience.

Firstly thanks for the reply. I do understand why you use social media so much, its just that of late it seems the forums have been somewhat neglected with very little communication, from Blizzard, here.

Thats why, as suggested, I think a "Banter with the Blues" topic every month or two for a couple of hours could be beneficial. It would show that there is an actual corridor for communication through these forums, even if certain topics were "taboo" as per the original Banter thread.

For example, I would like to know why the "Find a Practice Partner" threads are no longer stickied in GD and buried in an inactive sub-forum instead. You said above that you want to reach as many people as possible, yet this seems to contradict that claim. This is the type of thing I could ask in such a discussion and, hopefully, get an answer to.
That's something to consider - thanks for the feedback.

The Practice Partner is more of a relevant topic for Community Discussion. Plus, the more stickies we have in General Discussion (or any forum), the less people read them. It's just more of a community relevant post.

Then tell us how it does work, and why you're okay with speaking with the WoW forum audience that way?
I work on Hearthstone, so I don't know how the WoW forums function or how they choose to manage them.

The issues appears to be less of "the forum community is not receiving information" and more of "the forum community is not receiving enough direct unique engagement". I can see the forum community is getting the information that is distributed, as topics are created almost as soon as news goes up.

Twitter is not a good platform for extended discussions, and the character limit has its own complications to deal with. The forums, or any extended text discussion platform (such as Reddit) are better for that, and for player-to-player discussions.

But as was previously mentioned, it's more of a prioritization thing - we monitor the feedback and discussions that evolve on the forums while also supporting our social media channels, keeping in mind the unique world the PC and mobile audience that Hearthstone has each consumes content very differently.

Continued Actions Against Botting in Hearthstone

Goodbye automation! Another wave of bot accounts have been banned from Hearthstone - they weren't kidding about cracking down on bots.

Quote from Zeriyah

In our continued efforts to promote a fair play environment within Hearthstone, we have permanently banned Hearthstone accounts found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay, which is a violation of our Terms of Use.

We will continue to closely monitor Hearthstone and take action as needed to protect the game environment. Hearthstone accounts found to be cheating in any form will be permanently closed without warning.

If you believe that you’ve encountered a possible bot or other form of exploitation, please let us know by emailing our hacks team at hacks@blizzard.com.